On December 3, Jeff rebooted Transistor Thursdays with a “Solder Your Own Freeduino” class.  I had never played with an Arduino before, so I excitedly took the class.  I soldered it together, jumped for joy when the tests worked, and did the classic Arduino “hello world” of making an LED blink.  I played around with that for a little while, and then I got other ideas.

As anyone who has seen me play with my Commodores knows, I enjoy getting things to make noise.  Blinky is fun, but for me, loud is even more fun.  I went to my locker, cut a speaker off of a circuit board that I had already harvested for a few other parts for other projects, and hooked that up to the Arduino.  I then started familiarizing myself with the music coding commands…and didn’t stop until I had my Arduino playing something that was guaranteed to inspire people to throw ping pong balls at me.

The fact that the Arduino code loops over and over again until you cut the power meant there was only one song I could possibly choose for this:  The Song That Never Ends.

We’re going to have another solder your own arduino workshop next month for those of you who couldn’t get a ticket.  The next workshop is going to be on a weekend and have some portions tweaked and retooled.  Thanks again to the first group who helped us out with some great feedback for this first dry run.  Stay tuned to the blog for more details.